


Dead Meat

by HobbitSpaceCase



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Dehumanization, Gen, HYDRA Trash Party, Hallucinations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-30 21:21:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8549530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HobbitSpaceCase/pseuds/HobbitSpaceCase
Summary: Hydra feeds Bucky his own arm.





	

Bucky wakes up to a blinding headache and a strange, dead feeling all down his left side. Snatches of sound and color run through his brain, memories or dreams of white coated doctors and saws and _pain._ He should be dead, he thinks. He remembers falling, remembers screaming out his terror while Steve got smaller and smaller above him. The fall should have killed him, but Bucky finds himself surprisingly unsurprised to be alive. A lot of things the past year should have killed him, ever since that nightmare in Azzano that still wakes him up shaking and sweating in the middle of too-cold nights.

Voices murmur around Bucky’s head. Steve must have come back for him. Of course Steve came back for him. He’s laying on something hard, a metal table that presses against the knobs of his spine. When he forces his eyes open, the lights are uncomfortably bright, filling his vision with stars that blur at the edges into silver and sick green. His limbs feel heavy and awkward. Even twitching his fingers and toes forces a low moan through his lips. Commotion breaks out somewhere around his feet, and the words, “It’s awake,” filter through the fog in his head.

Something is off about the words. If his head weren’t so sluggish and throbbing, he’d be able to figure out what. As it is, he focuses instead on moving his limbs. They’re all still attached, but the left arm feels like he’s been laying on it wrong for a few hours, leaden and unwieldy without even pins and needles to mark it as still alive. He gets his elbows to bend, ignoring the chatter around him in favor of bringing his hands into focus and flexing his fingers. At first he thinks his left arm is in some sort of cast. The light glints off it, and he can’t see an inch of flesh.

“Vital signs are steady,” another voice says. Sounds and images are growing clearer. As his headache fades, the knowledge of what’s wrong crashes sharp and sudden like a knife in his gut. The words are in German, and Bucky hasn’t been saved by Steve.

Steve is dead.

Steve flew a plane into the ocean and he is dead.

Bucky’s worse than dead, a captive of Hydra, has been for several years now, and his arm _should be gone._ It should be a festering stump, but instead he was dragged into the room full of doctors and now he’s got an arm again, a hideous thing made of metal rings that slide over each other with quiet snicks and whispers as he moves.

One of the doctors approaches Bucky, a light shining bright behind him. Bucky reaches out with his new arm, grabs the doctor, and crushes his throat as easy as breathing. The commotion in the room grows louder. Shouting and the stink of fear fills the air, until a calm voice from his nightmares says, “Hush, Doctor. Did you not build in a safety measure?” Then Bucky is screaming, mind whiting out as electricity courses through the ugly new thing attached to his shoulder.

His body is left trembling in the aftermath. Bloody spit drips from his lips and his ears ring like Church bells, though he has never been further from God. He wonders, briefly, if Steve ever felt like this during one of his brushes with death. Several men approach him while he is still shivery and weak, holding guns in sweaty hands and watching him with eyes wide with fear. He hears the snick of restraints being fastened before the feeling of metal around his wrists and ankles registers. By the time he can react, he has been shackled like a feral dog to the lab table.

“Your old comrades made a deal with me,” says the calm voice. “My scientific expertise and information in return for conditional freedom. The chance to return to my work was easily temptation enough to agree.” The voice slides over Bucky’s skin, slips inside his panting mouth and crawls under his ribs to squeeze at the rough-pounding flesh of his heart.

Bucky would puke, if only he’d eaten anything in the past two days.

“Have you thrown away the remains, yet?” the voice asks from somewhere to Bucky’s left.

“No sir.”

Zola hums, pleased. “Good. Keep them. I should like to try an experiment.”

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Zola wakes Bucky from a shivery dream of blood-stained snow and screaming.

“My darling Soldier.”

He blinks awake and simultaneously curls tighter into a ball at the corner of his cell. Maybe if he ignores Zola, the cruel little man will go away.

Of course he has no such luck. Zola tsks at him. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll teach you obedience yet. In fact, I have thought of the perfect way to do so.”

Bucky doesn’t want to listen, but more than that he wants to know what Zola plans for him. Against his will, he cocks his head towards Zola’s voice. The pleased edge that enters his voice sends disgust running down Bucky’s spine. He shivers against the dirty stone wall of his cell, shoving his eyes against the prominent bones of his knees.

“One of the best ways to train a dog is through hunger. It works just as well on humans. I dare say you’re better than human after the work I’ve done, but I think it will work on you, too.” Bucky’s stomach chooses that moment to grumble, and Zola laughs. “You are better than human, now, but you belong to me. I have always been better than my peers, and I made you. Your outburst yesterday cost me one of my best doctors.”

Bucky bares his teeth at Zola. “Good,” he rasps, but Zola only tsks at him again.

“The remains of Bucky Barnes’s left arm were saved, you know. Kept in a freezer and used for tests, which is how we perfected the technology that will keep you frozen, once your training is done.” Bucky shudders again. Surely if they tried to freeze him, he would die? “It has outlived its usefulness, now, and was nearly thrown away. What a shame that would have been, when instead I can feed it to you. When you are hungry enough to apologize and promise to be better from now on, you may eat it as a show of your obedience. Do you have any questions, Soldier?”

Bucky says nothing. Eventually, the sound of Zola’s polished shoes on the stone floor signal his departure. Only then does Bucky uncurl. The metal arm has left bruises on his legs where he was holding them.

It is the only part of him that doesn’t shake every time he tries to fall asleep.

The next day, Zola returns. He carries a plate in one hand, with chunks of raw meat.

A thin stream of puke dribbles from Bucky’s mouth when he recognizes fingers among the meat on the plate. His fingers. Someone must have deboned the rest, because the fingers are the only pieces recognizable as human anymore.

He barely hears Zola around the ringing in his ear, and it’s not till he feels something wet drip down his back that he realizes he’s been pressing into the back of his cell hard enough to bleed against the stone. “No,” he manages to gasp out around the bile still trying to rise in his throat. Even with nothing in his stomach for days, it still heaves with a strength he didn’t think any of his exhausted muscles still possessed.

“No,” he says again, voice rough and weak with disuse.

Zola sighs. “It is only flesh, Soldier,” he says. “You are so much more than flesh, now.” The voice is almost as bad as the plate of meat that used to be his arm, and more bile paints the floor by his feet.

“I do not like to see you in pain,” Zola says, looking down at him with disappointment in the curl of his mouth and the slant of his eyes. “I would see you as glorious as you are meant to be, but first you must prove yourself worthy.” When Bucky snarls at him, sending flecks of spit and bile through the air, Zola sighs again and nods to a man behind him. Immediately, pain flares through the metal arm again.

It is not so bad as the first time, but it still makes Bucky scream and thrash. When he can see without sparklers in his eyes again, Zola is gone.

Tears bead and drip from the corners of his eyes, and he is too tired to wipe them away. Hydra has shown him many times by now how futile it is to resist their demands. They took his body and made it their own years ago, in Azzano. After the train, they took his body again, and now they’ve built a piece of themselves into it. He will never be free, even if Steve came back from the dead to rescue him.

There is no point to resistance. Sooner or later, Bucky will give in. He stopped trying to escape after they peeled the flesh from his feet and branded him with their insignia deep enough that the echoes of scar tissue can still be felt there, slightly raised and smoother than the surrounding skin. He let them touch him in humiliating places and test him with drugs that burned in his veins like poison but made his wounds close up like Steve’s after the serum. He has not killed for them, yet, but he is theirs already. What point is there in refusing to eat a piece of himself, when he has already allowed much worse things to happen to his body?

“The point is in standing up for what’s right,” says a voice from beside Bucky. His head snaps up, dizzyingly quick, and he nearly sobs in relief. Steve crouches next to him, all five foot four inches of him, thin blond hair in his sky-blue eyes.

“Steve,” Bucky whispers, not wanting the attention of the guards outside. “You shouldn’t be here.” Even as he speaks, he can’t keep the relief from his voice. Steve smiles at him and reaches out a hand to push greasy hair off his forehead.

“I could never leave my best guy,” Steve says, folding down to sit on the dirty floor. “Now go to sleep, Bucky. I’ll keep watch for you tonight.” Bucky nods, scooting into Steve’s warmth, and drifts off to sleep.

 

* * *

 

The days pass grindingly slowly. Zola returns at intervals that Bucky guesses are each a day long, but his cage is windowless and it’s not like anyone has offered him a clock to judge the passing of the time. For all he knows, it’s been only hours. For all he knows, it’s been years. Every time Zola presents him with the raw cuts of his own rotting meat, he claws up the courage to refuse, buying himself another night of shivering hunger pangs and restless sleep.

The only bearable part of the whole thing is Steve’s constant presence at his side. Currently, Steve is drawing his long artist’s fingers through Bucky’s filthy hair, murmuring quiet nonsense in his incongruously deep voice. He’s wearing his lounging around clothes – the coat from his father with more patches than coat and the pants that are constantly slipping down his hips, but that he keeps because they’re soft and it doesn’t matter if he splatters paint on them and wipes charcoal all down the seams – there’s no need to dress fancy for comforting a starving madman in a prison cell.

A rough laugh tumbles out of Bucky’s mouth, along with a string of blood and drool. “Something funny?” Steve asks, and the hand in Bucky’s hair stills. He pushes against it like one of the stray cats he used to drive his mother mad with. (She’d called Steve one of his stray cats, too, once. Bucky had only thought of how Steve would spit and snarl at the comparison, and smiled).

“I think the end of the line is coming up,” Bucky says. Steve sighs, tracing his hand down the knobs of Bucky’s spine, and around the scarring on his shoulder where it connects to Hydra’s monstrous arm. The skin there is an angry red, inflamed from the surgery and from the days of starvation that have followed, making a mismatch between the bulk of the metal and the hollow flesh.

Bucky stretches out for Steve’s fingers to continue their path, down the bumping lines of his ribs and into the hollow of his stomach. They trail through the coarse hair around his soft cock, sending a shiver of want through Bucky’s stomach that is swiftly consumed by the ever-present hunger. “I think you’re right,” Steve finally says. Bucky stares.

“Well,” Steve continues, fingers trailing lightly along Bucky’s naked skin, “look at you.” Bucky cringes, curling back up against the stone floor and adding more scrapes to the patchwork of blood and bruising on his skin. “It’s not just that you’re ugly,” Steve hastens to assure him. “I mean, I could handle it if you were just ugly.” He smiles softly at Bucky, and Bucky knows that smile. It’s the smile Steve wears when he’s pretending his heart isn’t breaking, that something horrible is going to be just fine. He wore that same smile the last time he spoke to his mother.

His fingers circle back to Bucky’s ruined shoulder, stopping short of the metal arm. “This, though?” he says, staring at the thing he refuses to touch. “You’re a part of them, now. It’s the only part of you that’s not weak anymore, a piece of Hydra technology grafted to your brittle bones. Do you think they’ll cut off more of you, once you give in? Replace you bit by bit with their tech, while you power it with the rotten stuff they’ve hacked off of Bucky’s body?”

Bucky shivers. He misses Steve’s hand in his hair, but he can’t deny the truth of Steve’s words. There’s been a monster growing inside his belly ever since Azzano. Here in a Hydra cell, hallucinating Steve while his real best friend lies dead in the ocean, the monster has grown to term and birthed itself inside of him.

He’s sick, with ugly things in his head that gained a mirror in the ugly thing Hydra attached to his side. He’s holding onto a principle that means nothing. He hasn’t belonged to himself in so long, would it really be so wrong to cannibalize the dead meat of Bucky Barnes?

The circling thoughts in his head are halted by footsteps. Zola is back, but there are more guards with him. Men in shiny suits with guns pointed at Bucky’s head as Zola unlocks the door of his tiny cell. One of them swings his gun over his shoulder and hauls Bucky out of the cell, snapping cuffs around his wrists before he can figure out what’s going on.

The cuff around the metal arm must be keyed to the arm somehow. It goes dead as soon as the cuff closes. The weight throws Bucky off balance, but strong, merciless hands catch him before he can hit the ground.

“I grow tired of waiting for you to come to your senses, Soldier,” Zola says to him, pivoting away back down the corridor. Bucky is dragged along behind, silent and confused. He thinks he might fall asleep on his feet when they reach a door, unmarked and indistinguishable from the rest of the doors they’ve passed to Bucky’s eye.

“I will have obedience from my creations,” Zola says, voice sliding around Bucky as they enter the room. There’s nothing in it except a table, a heavy chair with equally heavy cuffs, and on the table, the plate that Bucky has so far refused every time. Even knowing what it is, Bucky’s stomach growls at the smell of it.

He wants to puke, but he has a horrible sinking feeling that something sick will be going inside him rather than coming out before he leaves this room.

 

* * *

 

“Come now, Soldier. Do you still believe that you are human? This arm is not your arm. You are better than human now. I have made you more, and you belong to me. Eat, and you will be free of your lingering confusion about your place in the world. Cast off the weak thing you were, and eat.”  
  
“He’s right, you know.” Captain America stands in a corner of the room, unnoticed till now. “The very first thing you used that _abomination_ for was to kill. I would have done anything to rescue Bucky. Do you really think I’m still interested in rescuing _you_?”  
  
Buck - the Soldier - wrenches half-heartedly at the restraints around his right arm. Chains jangle, harsh and metallic, but do not break. He could say no again. Hungry snakes wind through his belly, and the tremors in his flesh limbs have grown to a constant low-level hum of quivering muscle, distracting and obvious to everyone in the room.  
  
He could still say no.  
  
Saliva pools in his mouth, sticky sweet and cloying with the smell of his arm on the table thick in his nose.  
  
“Your hesitance will get you nowhere, Soldier.” Zola has moved closer while Bucky zoned out. Captain America stands behind Zola’s left shoulder, eyes blank to hide disappointment.  
  
His stomach gurgles, and laughter drifts from the walls like smoke. How many days has it been since he’d eaten?  
  
“Twelve days,” Zola says.  
  
It feels more like twelve years. The metal arm lays useless at his side, deactivated by clever switches built into his shoulder. The fingers are still stained copper from the dead doctor’s blood. It flakes from the groves, falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Soon, he will be stripped bare, down to his bones like a tree in winter.  
  
“My Winter Soldier.” Bucky jerks again as Zola’s oily voice slides down his spine. He is too close, so close Bucky can feel him standing right behind the chair, though his eyes are fixed on the table in front of him. The table, and the arm. Would it really be so bad to eat it? He is the creature in the chair, and the arm is just chunks of meat, really. He can’t even feel it. It is no more a part of him than the table it sits on.  
  
He will have to lean forward to eat it, like an animal. He feels like an animal, hungry and snarling and scared like a rabid dog. A dog doesn’t think about its actions, just tries whatever it can to avoid more pain. That doesn’t sound so bad to Bucky.  
  
“There,” Zola says, petting a hand through his hair when he takes the first bite. Bucky is too tired to even recoil. “Does it not feel good to obey?”  
  
It feels like fat sticking to his tongue, scraps of himself forming a choking ball in his throat.  
  
“Water,” he says. He can’t see Zola, but the man must give some sort of signal. A few minutes later, a bowl of water is placed next to plate in front of Bucky. He lowers his head, lapping like a dog, and that does feel good. He’s never felt anything as good as the cool water sliding down his throat, washing down the cloying meat in its wake.  
  
Suddenly, he is ravenous. The next bites are so easy, and so good. The taste is not unlike the canned meat he used to eat in Brooklyn when fresh meat was too expensive or unavailable. There is a faint metallic tang that clings to it, and the slight sliminess of meat that has started to go bad, but it is still sets saliva flooding his mouth, dripping on the plate as he eats.   
  
He doesn't know why he waited so long to give in. Resistance was always a pointless endeavor. It only takes moments to finish off what had just minutes before seemed such an insurmountable task. He hardly realizes he’s licking the plate until Zola’s hand is back in his hair, guiding his head away. “Good boy,” Zola praises, and the Soldier preens.  
  
Across the room, Captain America smiles at him, small like Steve used to be small. “There you go, Buck,” he says. “There’s the end of the line.” The words cause a twinge of discomfort in the Soldier’s gut, but he forcibly dismisses them.  
  
When he is unshackled from the chair, he follows his owners meekly. They lead him to a different cell from the one he previously occupied, one that has an actual mattress against the back wall and two bowls on the floor, one filled with water. He attacks it greedily as soon as he is shoved through the door. There is laughter from outside the bars of his new cell, but it is as inconsequential as the fading image of the man in a red, white, and blue outfit.  
  
He tells himself the tears that plink like raindrops into the bowl are also inconsequential. He almost manages to believe it.

 


End file.
